[Qemu-devel] 'qemu-nbd' explicit flush

["Mark Trumpold" <markt@netqa.com>]

Hello all,

I am using ‘qemu-nbd’ and ‘qemu-img’ from the command line to provide ‘qcow2’ loop filesystems.  For performance, I have '--cache=writeback' set for the qemu-nbd device.

I am having trouble flushing all caches to disk at will; specifically before snapshotting the underlying filesystem that hold the ‘qcow2’ images.

Environment:
    Qemu 1.2.0
    Debian 6.0.5
    Linux kernel 3.3.1 with Qemu patch to enable kernel flushing:
        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.nbd.general/1108

Usage example:
    'qemu-nbd --cache=writeback -c /dev/nbd0 /images/my-qcow.img'
    'mount /dev/nbd0 /my-mount-point'

Everything does flush correctly when I first unmount and then disconnect the device; however, in my case I am not able to unmount things before snapshotting.

I tried several approaches externally to flush the device.  For example:
    'mount -o remount,ro /dev/nbd0'
    'blockdev --flushbufs /dev/nbd0'

I have been looking at the Qemu source code and in user space 'nbd.c' in routine 'nbd_trip' I see the case 'NBD_CMD_FLUSH' which looks to be called from the NBD socket interface.  Here I see 'bdrv_co_flush(exp->bs)' which looks promising; however, I don't know how to setup the 'bs' pointer for the call.

Ideally, I would like to add a command line parm to 'qemu-nbd.c' to explicitely do the flush, but so far no luck.

I've been struggling with this for some time.  Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Mark Trumpold